Category: Blogs

Latin America Leads by Example on Women’s Leadership

Data set forth in a recent Atlantic Council report shows that ushering in female leadership at the upper echelons of society is “not just a moral decision,” but a strategic one, Michele Flournoy, former under secretary of defense for policy at the US Department of Defense, said at the Atlantic Council on May 31. “You […]

Ukraine Beats Russia in Epic Gas Battle

By Anders Aslund

On May 31, Ukraine’s Naftogaz won an extraordinary victory over Russia’s Gazprom in the international arbitration court in Stockholm. This was the possibly biggest international arbitration verdict ever. Gazprom had claimed $47.1 billion from Naftogaz, half of Ukraine’s GDP, and Naftogaz $30.3 billion from Gazprom.   Naftogaz won on all three counts the court considered. […]

A Tribute to Zbigniew Brzezinski

                                    Madeleine AlbrightUS Secretary of State (1997-2001) “His absence will be felt, and his presence sorely missed, but Zbig’s ideas and his worldview will continue to influence the foreign policy debate for many years to come. In today’s complicated world, […]

NATO’s Double Standards: Why Montenegro but Not Ukraine?

By Taras Kuzio

On June 5, Montenegro will become the twenty-ninth member of NATO. This comes at a time when accession talks with the EU are also occurring; the EU has offered membership to Montenegro and other countries in the western Balkans. To any careful observer, it is obvious that the standards for Montenegro’s inclusion in the alliance […]

America First Also Means Europe First

By Louis Golino

The NATO summit in Brussels on May 25 was an important opportunity for US President Donald J. Trump to turn his recent statement about the Alliance no longer being obsolete in his opinion into real progress in transatlantic relations. However, Trump’s boorish behavior at the summit, his failure to endorse the Alliance’s mutual defense clause, […]

Will Ukraine’s New Supreme Court Be Any Different?

By Mykhailo Zhernakov

Every successful reform needs the right legal framework, the right institutions, and the right people. Take NABU—Ukraine’s newly established National Anticorruption Bureau. This spring it managed to arrest the notorious head of the State Fiscal Service Roman Nasirov, and one of the country’s top political moguls Mykola Martynenko—a task no other law enforcement body would […]

How Putin Accidentally United Ukraine

By Peter Dickinson

Ukraine became an independent country in 1991, but it took the outbreak of war in 2014 to forge it into a fully-fledged nation. As is often the case with major historic shifts, this change was not immediately apparent at the time. Even now, three years on, it may come as news to the millions of […]